Benedict Anderson, in full Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson (born August 26, 1936, Kunming, China—died December 12/13, 2015, Batu, Indonesia) Irish political scientist, best known for his influential work on the origins of nationalism.

Benedict Anderson.

Courtesy of the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program

Anderson’s family heritage crosses national lines. Benedict inherited his name from his English mother and his Irish citizenship from his father, whose family had been active in Irish nationalist movements. He was born in China, where his father was stationed as a custom commissioner in the Imperial Maritime Customs, a British office charged with overseeing trade with China but also fulfilling other tasks on its territory such as fighting smuggling.

After a few years back in Ireland, the Anderson family immigrated to the United States in 1941, and Benedict received schooling in California. Anderson graduated with high honours from the University of Cambridge (B.A. in classics, 1957) and was awarded a Ph.D. in government by Cornell University in 1967. His early work, including his doctoral dissertation, focused on Indonesian politics. His critique of the Suharto regime led him to be barred from entering the country until after the dictator’s fall in 1998. From 1965 until his retirement in 2002, Anderson taught in the department of government at Cornell University. In 1988 he was appointed Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies.

In 1983 the publication of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism established Anderson’s reputation as one of the foremost thinkers on nationalism. In the book Anderson theorized the condition that led to the development of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the Americas, and famously defined the nation as an “imagined community.” The nation is imagined, according to Anderson, because it entails a sense of communion or “horizontal comradeship” between people who often do not know each other or have not even met. Despite their differences, they imagine belonging to the same collectivity, and they attribute to the latter a common history, traits, beliefs, and attitudes. Anderson further defined this imagined community as limited and sovereign: limited, because even the largest nations recognize some boundaries and the existence of other nations beyond them; sovereign, because the nation replaced traditional kinship ties as the foundation of the state. The fact that the nation is an imaginary construct does not, however, mean that its political effect is any less real. On the contrary, Anderson argued, this imagined community creates a deep horizontal comradeship, for which countless people have willingly sacrificed themselves.

Imagined Communities ran against the grain of the historiographical research of its time by placing the Americas, rather than Europe, at the centre of its analysis. Nationalism, Anderson noted, developed in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States, Brazil, and the former Spanish colonies, much earlier than in most of Europe. The development of nationalism, he argued, was caused by the convergence of capitalism and print media. According to Anderson, the development of mass vernacular newspapers laid the basis for the nation because their readership could imagine sharing a collective experience of the news, irrespective of their geographical distance from each other and of social hierarchies. Anderson’s work also highlighted the importance of “creole pioneers” such as Benjamin Franklin and Simón Bolívar in leading movements of national liberation. Though of European descent and sharing the same language as their ancestors, creoles developed distinct traditions and experiences and acquired a sense of collective identity. The metropolis not only seemed increasingly remote to creoles but also excluded them from the upper echelons of its bureaucracy and generally discriminated against them, even when the only difference that separated them from their parents was their birthplace. It is this feeling of alienation and oppression, Anderson theorized, that led a relatively well-off class to rebel at the risk of their lives.

Anderson regarded national belonging as a central but underappreciated factor in the development of the state. He criticized both liberalism and Marxism for failing to account for the deep attachment people have to their nation and for the profound historical impact of nationalism since the late 18th century. Unlike many theorists of nationalism, Anderson sharply distinguished it from racism and wrote in positive terms of the capacity of nationalism to unite people across classes and lead them to sacrifice their person for the collectivity.

Anderson’s theory of nationalism has been criticized by postcolonial theorists. They contend that using the prism of nationalism to study the history of colonized countries is to conflate the experience of the elite or bourgeoisie with that of the people as a whole. His most vocal critic, the Indian-born postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee, rejected Anderson’s representation of nationalism as the creation of creole pioneers and argued that nationalism was an ideology imposed by the colonizing power such that “even our imaginations must forever remain colonized.” Although Anderson had his share of critics, most recognized the value of his groundbreaking contribution to a non- (or at least less-) Eurocentric study of world history and nationalism.

Anderson’s other books include The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (1998), Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (2006), and Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2007). He published extensively on Indonesian culture and politics and was the editor in chief of the journal Indonesia between 1966 and 1984. In 1994 he was appointed to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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